Flickr, the Election and Social Media

Silicon Alley Insider points out another thing that is suggestive of a new era: “Behind the scenes” photos of the Obama and Biden clans watching election-night returns, uploaded to Yahoo’s Flickr within a little over 24 hours of being taken:

What a great thing Flickr is. And note how seeing these images on Flickr “flattens” everything: Obama seems much more a “normal” person, much closer to the person looking at these images than he and his family would in Time or even People.

If you have time, look also at some of the comments that are associated with each picture — many of them from outside the US. This is a form of “democracy” too; people are “participating” in responding to these photos.

As has already been pointed out Obama on Facebook is the largest Facebook group. But the larger Internet-based “community” that the Obama campaign created is, in one way of looking at it, now a “social network.”